Kidanemaryam W. Reta

I am a plant scientist with a PhD in plant biotechnology and a research focus on crop physiology, plant metabolism, and trait characterization under complex abiotic stress. My work asks how root system variation, ion partitioning, photosynthesis, water status, metabolism, gene expression, and phenology interact to shape stress resilience and crop productivity.

My doctoral research at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev examined responses of Vitis vinifera grafts to combined abiotic stress, integrating field, greenhouse, and semi-controlled experiments with metabolomics, ionomics, physiology, transcriptomics, phenomics, and advanced data analysis. I use gas exchange and chlorophyll fluorescence measurements, GC-MS/LC-MS metabolomics, ICP-OES ion profiling, root and shoot phenotyping, network analysis, and machine learning to identify stress-response thresholds and trait-performance relationships.

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in plant metabolomics and physiology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where I lead an OIV-funded project combining multi-year physiological phenotyping, UAV-based thermal sensing, metabolomics, and gene expression profiling to characterize varietal responses to heatwave stress. I am also developing AI-enabled predictive approaches that integrate biological datasets with climate information to forecast long-term varietal performance under future environmental scenarios.

Before my PhD, I worked in crop improvement and agronomy in Ethiopia, contributing to sorghum breeding, dryland production, genotype-by-environment analysis, seed systems, and the release of improved sorghum varieties. Across these roles, my research trajectory has moved from agronomy, seed biology, and quantitative breeding toward mechanistic plant physiology, systems biology, and data-driven crop resilience.

My broader interests include root-shoot interactions, carbon and ion regulation under stress, high-throughput phenotyping, digital agriculture, plant-soil interactions, and lab-to-field translation of physiological and metabolic traits for climate-resilient crop improvement.

Current research themes: crop stress physiology; grapevine responses to combined salinity, water deficit, and heatwave stress; rootstock-mediated stress tolerance; metabolomics and ionomics; UAV-based thermal phenotyping; network analysis; and climate-informed predictive modeling.